Pan Am: Rise and Fall of the Airline That Built the Jet Age

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Pan American World Airways began not as a luxury brand but as a military worry. In 1927, Army Air Corps officers Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz saw that a German-owned airline in Colombia, SCADTA, sat a short flight from the Panama Canal. The answer was an American competitor on the mail route from Key West to Havana, and the ruthless entrepreneur Juan Trippe held the Cuban landing rights. Treated by Washington as its chosen instrument, Pan Am bought up Latin American carriers, then crossed the Pacific in flying boats, blasting coral at Midway, Wake Island, and Guam to build its own refueling towns.

This episode follows the airline from the Clipper era through its peak, when Trippe ordered 25 Boeing 747s for $525 million and the company flew to 86 countries, owned the InterContinental hotel chain, and ran a reactor testing station in Nevada. Then came the 1973 oil crisis, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, and the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie. The end arrived in a single morning in December 1991, when Delta declined to provide a final $25 million.

• After Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Clipper could not fly home east, so its crew flew west around the world and landed in New York, the first commercial circumnavigation.
• A one-way ticket from San Francisco to Asia cost about $950 in 1937, while government mail contracts covered most of the operation's cost.
• Irish coffee was created in Foynes, Ireland by a local chef warming up cold Pan Am flying boat passengers.
• Barred for decades from domestic routes, Pan Am had no feeder network once deregulation let United and American fly overseas themselves.
• The airline sold its New York building to MetLife for $400 million and its entire Pacific division to United for $750 million before its last flight, Clipper Goodwill, on December 4th, 1991.